1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of translation memory and, more particularly, to a new computer-aided translation system suitable for technical materials now widely used in the localization of computer software.
2. Description of the Related Art
The idea of translation memory is basically very simple. Translation memory serves to increase the efficiency of the translation process of technical documents, saving considerable time by prompting the answer to the question: “How did I translate this or a similar sentence last time?” A translation memory provides a powerful tool for automatic translation of sentences that have been previously translated by experts and stored within the translation memory database, with minor differences in an original segment being accounted for by suggesting a translation of a similar segment found in the databases. The translation memory should preserve the format of the original document, restoring such format once the translation is complete.
Automatic translation of sentences that have been stored in a database is certainly very easy, provided that the syntactical sentence structure as well as the entire word usage including word order used in both documents are consistent and identical throughout the documents. Unfortunately, any natural language used in practice is context-sensitive and is sharply distinguished from the artificial languages such as programming languages in that extensive use of ambiguous expressions is allowed, including synonymies and polysemies and ambiguous syntactical structures, for example. Therefore, a most difficult and challenging task required of translations based on a translation memory scheme is the matching of sentences which have a similar, or exactly the same, meaning but which are expressed using different words or in terms of differing structural expressions. This difficulty may be resolved with the help of the latent semantic index (LSI) matching principle.
To allow processing of flexible, context-sensitive natural languages, which are characterized by ambiguities, a template automaton structure has been designed as set forth in Japanese Patent No. 2887660, exploiting the FSA (finite state automaton)-based ATN transitional rules. This template automation structure allows for multiple expressions of ambiguous words and ambiguous syntactic structures while retaining the clarity in diverse meanings of the sentences, where each of the paths in the template constitutes a complete and meaningful context-sensitive sentence. The template structure is capable of storing and representing sentences using different expressions or structures denoting equivalent meanings provided the language is restricted to one of the natural languages.